by Pat Gilbert
One of the most powerful tracks on Black Tie White Noise, “Jump They Say,” appeared to confront Terry Burns’s suicide and became the unlikely choice for the first single off the album, which made the UK top spot in March 1993. In the States, Black Tie White Noise fared less well, largely because the label it appeared on, Savage, went bust not long after its release. In a curious twist, the company began legal proceedings against the singer to recoup some of its advance, but the case was thrown out of court.
Meanwhile, Bowie’s status of an elder statesman of rock, respected by a new generation of young musicians, was underscored in an NME cover feature that paired Bowie with Brett Anderson of Britpop founding fathers, Suede, whose work was heavily and unashamedly shaded by the singer’s 1970s canon. Bowie had already formed a mutual fan club with Morrissey, whose “I Know It’s Gonna Happen Someday” was covered on Black Tie White Noise, and now offered a similar hand of friendship to Anderson, regarded by many as Morrissey’s heir. “It was an amazing day for me, being such a fan,” Anderson told the author. “What I remember most was how very charming, friendly, and funny Bowie was. He wasn’t distant or difficult at all, which was how you might have imagined him to be. As an artist, what made him special was this brilliant ability he had to blend the mainstream and the avant-garde into one thing and still make it incredibly palatable. The image, the personality, it all needed to be present for it to work, but at the end of the day, it was the music.”
Around the same time, Interview magazine dispatched novelist Hanif Kureishi to write a piece on the singer. Kureishi, raised in an Anglo-Pakistani household in Bromley, had won a prestigious Whitbread Book Award for his 1990 novel, The Buddha of Suburbia, which painted London’s suburbs as landscapes that compelled their inhabitants to escape—a notion Bowie understood only too well. At the end of the meeting, the writer asked Bowie if he would contribute a song to the BBC’s forthcoming TV dramatization of his book; Bowie’s response was to offer instead to write the whole soundtrack. Working closely with Kureishi, the singer wrote around forty pieces of incidental music, as well as the title song. Then, just as he had with Baal, he reworked the music into a record of his own, employing Kizilçay and Garson to help him. The result was one of his most underrated works of the 1990s, an atmospheric and poignant record which crept out almost unnoticed on its release in November 1993—the same month Nirvana recorded its legendary MTV Unplugged performance, which unexpectedly paid homage to Bowie with a faithful cover of “The Man Who Sold the World.”
Bowie’s soundtrack to The Buddha of Suburbia, which he wrote and recorded in six days and later cited as his favorite of his own albums.
Bowie’s desire to return to his arty roots was signaled by his next move. At Bowie and Iman’s wedding reception in 1992, the singer and Brian Eno had discussed working together again, and in early 1994, Bowie and his old Berlin Trilogy partner paid a visit to the Haus der Künstler, an artists’ community within a psychiatric hospital near Vienna. The unit’s approach to treating patients placed an emphasis on expression through painting and music, an idea that chimed with Bowie and Eno’s interest in outsider art—and in themselves as outsider artists. Bowie assembled a band at Mountain Studios featuring Reeves Gabrels, Erdal Kizilçay, Mike Garson, and drummer Sterling Campbell. Under Eno’s direction, a “game” commenced wherein the musicians were obliged to react to bizarre, Oblique Strategies–style commands and improvise atop other artists’ records—after which the original source was erased—or simply compose together spontaneously. Other pieces were written by Bowie using a computer program that randomly jumbled sound files. “It was one of the most creative environments I’ve ever been in,” Garson recalled to David Buckley.
Intrigued by the prevailing trend for piercings and tattoos, Bowie composed lyrical themes that explored the idea that the demise of religion had created a neo-paganist culture, with its own ritualistic behaviors and attitudes linking life, blood, art, and death. He’d also become interested in the legend surrounding the Minotaur of Crete, the fabulous creature of classical mythology that possessed a man’s body and a bull’s head and guarded the Labyrinth. These disparate elements were woven into a loose narrative for the record, previewed in Q magazine in December 1994 in the form of a short murder mystery story called “The Diary of Nathan Adler, or the Art-Ritual Murder of Baby Grace Blue.” The plot involved a private detective recounting the cybernetic resurrection of a dead baby, with allusions to 1990s art and even to Bowie himself.
Bowie took an increasing interest in computers in the 1990s, both as a songwriting aid and as a means to explore the new frontiers of the Internet.
Bowie’s nineteenth album, 1. Outside, reunited him with Brian Eno and was originally intended as the first in a second trilogy of collaborations. The cover image is a self-portrait entitled The Dhead–Outside.head–Outside.
The album, which had the working title Leon and filled three CDs, was Bowie’s most fully realized avant-garde work since the late 1970s. But, with Nirvana, Oasis, and Blur having made guitar records fashionable again, Bowie struggled to find a record label prepared to release it. In January 1995, he bowed to pressure and, with Alomar and Kevin Armstrong on guitar, created a more concise version of the album at New York’s Hit Factory, adding more conventional—and superlative—new songs such as “No Control” and “We Prick You.” Bowie also reworked the track “Hallo Spaceboy,” a frantic industrial-pop hybrid evolved from a piece Reeves Gabrels had written called “Moondust,” which fitted seamlessly into Bowie’s career-spanning catalog of space-themed songs. In June 1995, a few weeks after Bowie exhibited his painting at a London gallery—including images of the Minotaur—he inked a deal with Virgin America and RCA/BMG in the UK. Three months later, the retitled 1. Outside finally hit the racks, coinciding with the start of a year-long world tour which Bowie warned the public would not be a greatest hits package. Instead, the 1. Outside tour aimed to revisit some of the neglected corners of his back catalog, including album tracks from the Berlin Trilogy, while also featuring a substantial chunk of 1. Outside, whose haunting, hypnotic “The Heart’s Filthy Lesson” was soon to become familiar to cinemagoers the world over as the end-credits music for David Fincher’s noir-ish crime thriller Seven.
1. Outside was undoubtedly a masterpiece, and despite its experimental, anti-pop aesthetic, it fared well commercially, reaching No. 8 in the UK and No. 21 in the States. But the tour to promote it, with Nine Inch Nails as support on the US leg and Morrissey in the UK, was less enthusiastically received, with audiences confused by the esoteric setlist despite Bowie’s attempts to make clear that it was far from tailored to the requirements of fair-weather fans. Bowie’s performances, though, were among his most powerful ever, bolstered by a touring band that featured an intriguing mix of familiar faces—Reeves Gabrels, Carlos Alomar, Mike Garson, and backing singer George Simms—and young blood—bassist Gail Ann Dorsey, drummer Zachary Alford, and keyboardist/musical director Peter Schwartz.
During a month-long summer break in August 1996, Bowie took the group into Philip Glass’s New York studio to work on 1. Outside’s follow-up, Earthling, which, with the singer’s antennae ever attuned to the new, co-opted pounding techno and drum ’n’ bass rhythms for several tracks, reflecting his and Gabrels’s fondness for dance acts such as Prodigy and Underworld. A key collaborator on the project was engineer Mark Plati, who’d worked as part of 1980s dance pioneer Arthur Baker’s production team, leading to sessions with Quincy Jones, Janet Jackson, and Prince. Alford’s drum patterns became the focus of particular attention, and programmed loops and live drums exquisitely meshed to create Earthling’s complex beats. The following month, the album’s stirring calling card “Little Wonder” was incorporated into the band’s set and plans were hatched to launch the album—whose cover pictured Bowie with rakish goatee and the distressed Union flag frockcoat he’d worn on the summer festival dates—at a special concert at Madison Square Garden in January 1997 to celebrate his fifti
eth birthday.
A ticket for one of Bowie’s fall 1995 European shows with Morrissey, who ended up withdrawing from the tour after nine dates.
Bowie onstage with Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, with whom he co-headlined a run of North American shows in support of 1. Outside, at the Meadowlands Arena in East Rutherford, New Jersey, September 28, 1995.
The cover art to Earthling, which shows Bowie in a Union Jack frockcoat designed by Alexander McQueen.
The Madison Square Garden show, staged on January 9, the day after Bowie reached his half century, was an opportunity for his biggest fans in contemporary music to pay their respects. Pixies’ Frank Black joined the singer for “Scary Monsters” and “Fashion,” Foo Fighters pitched in for “Hallo Spaceboy,” the Cure’s Robert Smith had a duet with Bowie on “Quicksand,” Sonic Youth pulverized Earthling’s “I’m Afraid of Americans,” a grinning Lou Reed growled his way through a medley of Velvet Underground numbers, and Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan took the stage for “All the Young Dudes” and “The Jean Genie.” Quizzed where he saw his career going from here, Bowie replied, “I have no idea… but I promise I won’t bore you.”
The Earthling tour ran from June to November 1997, and the eclectic setlist met with the same mixed reaction as the Outside dates had. In the UK, the album—which twenty years on still sounds contemporary with its alluring collision of atmospheric pop, dog-fighting guitars, industrial grind, and fuzzy electronica—reached No. 6, though in the States it barely scraped the Top 40. But with Bowie’s ability to confound also came an impulse to surprise. At the Phoenix Festival at Stratford-upon-Avon in July, Bowie preceded his Sunday night headlining slot with a storming secret “guerrilla gig” the previous day in the dance tent, performing a drum ’n’ bass set under the guise of the Tao Jones Index.
Bowie prepares to blow out the candles on his fiftieth birthday cake at Madison Square Garden, New York, January 9, 1997.
The reflective Hours, released in 1999, saw Bowie look backward for the first time in his career.
The pun on the Dow Jones index was timely: in 1997, Bowie’s outsider thinking had expanded to his fiscal dealings. Using an innovation dreamed up by finance guru David Pullman, that September Bowie floated his back catalog on the stock exchange via a concept dubbed Bowie Bonds, whereby investors could secure a share of the singer’s future royalties for a ten-year term. As sales of Bowie’s old records were topping a million copies a year, the idea was an attractive one. The scheme instantly netted Bowie around $55 million, which, ingeniously, he used to buy out Tony Defries’s stake in the recordings he’d made up until 1982. The rest of the money he reinvested in the stock market to buy back the bonds when they expired. Such was the brilliance of the plan that the “Celebrity Bond” soon became a popular way for artists to exploit the fruits of their past labors. Pullman later commented that “David was an intuitive guy. He picked up on [the concept] instantaneously.”
As the millennium approached, Bowie’s interest in exploring intriguing new avenues outside music continued to develop. An early adopter of the Internet, Bowie had engaged in webchats with fans since the 1. Outside era, and in 1998 he unveiled his own websites, davidbowie.com and bowieart.com. Soon after, these were joined by an Internet provider, BowieNet. The singer’s enthusiasm for state-of-the-art technology became the catalyst for his next album, Hours, which developed from the soundtrack he’d been asked to write for a video game, Omikron: The Nomad Soul, designed by the company behind Tomb Raider. The game featured Bowie as a character named Boz, leader of the Awakened, though he also appeared as an avatar of himself performing at venues around Omikron City with Reeves Gabrels and Gail Ann Dorsey.
Most of the recording for the album took place in Bermuda, with Bowie and Gabrels helming a studio group including Mark Plati (playing bass and synths as well as programming) and drummers Sterling Campbell and Mike Levesque. Bowie’s aim was to combine contemporary digital studio techniques with old-fashioned chord progressions and melodies, an approach that would lend tracks such as “Thursday’s Child,” “If I’m Dreaming My Life,” and “Seven,” an enchanting, self-questioning, nostalgic atmosphere, chiming with album’s lyrical preoccupations with past relationships, mortality, childhood memories, and the nature of existence. There were solid rockers too, including the Idiot-like “The Pretty Things Are Going to Hell,” a song acknowledging the possible fate of Bowie and his beautiful generation. Released in September 1999, with artwork that showed a contemporary, long-haired Bowie cradling his moribund, short-haired 1990s self, Hours was a powerful restatement of his gifts as a conventional songwriter, though following the downward path of his 1990s sales graph, it failed to make the Billboard Top 40 in the United States, the first Bowie album to suffer this fate since Ziggy Stardust.
Bowie onstage at the Astoria, London, during the short tour in support of Hours, December 2, 1999.
Bowie onstage at the Glastonbury Festival, June 25, 2000—his first time back since 1971.
But even if the investors in his Bowie Bonds were unduly fretting (though when the bonds expired in 2007, the shareholders’ original investment was paid back in full), the first weeks of the twenty-first century found Bowie on a creative and emotional high—the latter not least because in February 2000 it was announced that he and Iman were expecting a child. With parenthood looming yet again, Bowie attempted to quit smoking, leading to a series of minor health issues. For the first time in his career, a Bowie concert—one of three that June at New York’s Roseland Ballroom—was canceled due to a bout of laryngitis. The dates, which saw Earl Slick rejoining the band, replacing Reeves Gabrels after his and Bowie’s relationship had cooled, were warmups for a headlining slot at the Glastonbury Festival, the first time Bowie had played at Pilton Farm since his 5:00 a.m. performance in 1971.
It was perhaps this completion of a circle, and the dawning of a new century, that influenced the singer’s decision to record an album of remakes of his “lost” late-60s classics, including “The London Boys,” “Can’t Help Thinking About Me,” “You’ve Got a Habit of Leaving,” and “Let Me Sleep Beside You.” The sessions, which took place in New York just a month before his and Iman’s daughter, Alexandria, was born, were penciled in for release the following year under the title Toy, after a new song written for the project. But it in a move that Bowie found immensely dispiriting, EMI/Virgin refused to release the album, insisting he should deliver a record of fresh material first. The issue was never resolved and precipitated the artist’s ill-tempered split with the company in 2001. (The song “Toy” later became the Internet-only track “Your Turn to Drive,” while the rest of the album would also eventually trickle out in various forms.)
A ticket and program for the 2000 Glastonbury Festival, headlined by Bowie, Travis, and the Chemical Brothers.
Bowie gives a solemn reading of Paul Simon’s “America” to open the Concert for New York City at Madison Square Garden, October 20, 2001.
Ironically, while Toy hung in limbo, Bowie was already at work on a record of all-new material, reuniting him with producer Tony Visconti, whose last major project with the singer had been Scary Monsters. Visconti had worked with Bowie on the string arrangements for Toy, as well as other recordings, but their renewed friendship didn’t become public knowledge until the producer joined Bowie on bass for an appearance at the Tibet House Benefit Concert at Carnegie Hall. The majority of what would become Heathen was laid down that summer at Allaire Studios, a facility hidden away in the Catskill Mountains 150 miles north of New York. Bowie found the remote location, two thousand feet above sea level and overlooking a reservoir teaming with wildlife, inspirational, explaining that when he first went there, “It was almost like my feet were lifted off the ground.”
The beautiful, barren, tranquil landscape reflected his meditative state of mind: his mother, Peggy, had died in April, aged eighty-eight, at a nursing home in Saint Albans, while the following month Freddie Burretti, who designed some of Bowie�
�s most iconic 1970s costumes, passed away in Paris. While Hours had contemplated mortality, the lyrics that Bowie rose at 6:00 a.m. each day to write went further, seemingly describing the moment of death on the mournful title track and questioning his faith in a higher being on the plaintive, gentle “A Better Future.” He also ventured into the stars once again with a cover of the Legendary Stardust Cowboy’s “I Took a Trip on a Gemini Spaceship,” a rare moment of light humor. The otherwise sad, contemplative feel of the record took on a new purpose when, while Bowie and Visconti were mixing the record in New York, the twin towers of the World Trade Center came under attack. Since he’d sold his property in Lausanne in 1998, Bowie had become an inveterate New Yorker, loving the family-centered life he led at his Broadway condominium—so it was perhaps only natural that he should join in the Concert for New York City, staged on October 20, to remember those killed in the 9/11 attacks.